Racial reality and unreality1

This chapter explores the debates on what race is. For some time, the dominant social constructionist approach in the social sciences has insisted that the only proper way to regard race is by refuting any connection with biology. Attention to the many ways in which race is socially constructed has been important; but, while a construction is not ‘unreal’, there is a common further step in which race is thereby deemed to be not valid. The rejection of race tends to treat race as something that would be ‘real’ if it were located in science and biology. The chapter then shows how recent developments in the natural sciences and changing views on the relationship between the natural and social sciences problematise that view. Yet in opposition to post-race views, critical scholars can then be seen to draw on conventional categories of race to show that racialised inequality still matters.

‘The changing same’

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the questions of race and racism, and of policing and policy. In many ways, the landscape around the politics of race and policing has altered dramatically — the extent and depth of research on race, policing, and policy alone bears no comparison with the 1970s and 1980s; the same also applies to public and media discussions of racism. However, there is something very familiar, even unchanging, about the ways in which the same matters recur: complaints of unfair and discriminatory over-policing of black people, of racism and inequality in public policy, and the unresolved legacy of cases from the 1990s. This book argues that the ongoing and unresolved challenges around race and racism are troubling in academic discourse as well as in public policy and debate and, moreover, that the discussion of these is linked together.

Framing riots

This concluding chapter explores the scholarly commentary and research on riots that occurred in August 2011 in England. As incidents of violent disorder occurring in urban settings, they were commonly linked to recent historical and contemporary concerns about policing operations, in which race occupies a significant place, particularly through the over-policing of black people. The chapter then provides a heuristic framework of ways in which the riots were understood. By delineating the key features of each, it indicates their partialities and their consequences in terms of what academic framing does in shaping understandings of what matters in race and policing policy concerns. The argument is that these frames lend weight to particular ways of thinking about riots, while obscuring others.

Sociology and institutional racism1

This chapter traces the origins of the term ‘institutional racism’ in the 1960s in the Black Power movement, and its adoption and then rejection by policy makers and the academy. This history reflects the rise and fall of institutional racism over at least four decades from the 1960s. Nevertheless, it is a term and an idea that refuses to go away, as events in 2014–16 show. The chapter then links the public face of institutional racism — in relation to the police — with an ‘internal’ view of how it was utilised to critique the whiteness of sociology, itself something that has been revived to denounce universities and the social sciences through campaigns such as ‘Rhodes must fall’.

Racialisation1

This chapter provides a genealogy of the term ‘racialisation’, and outlines some of the main ways in which it has been understood and deployed from its origins through to neo-Marxist and intersectional approaches, and beyond. Racialisation is not a single analytic; it covers a number of different strands that are or can be interrelated, but also competing and point to different aspects and features of race making. The key issue is how to advance a notion that is analytically powerful as well as situationally complex to the multiple intersections of race in which racialisation is a multiple, ongoing, and intersected process, and racial practices and racial meanings can encompass struggles over subjugated identity positions and racial categorisations.

Racialised numerics1

This chapter focuses on the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) recruitment target. The BME target illustrates the policy and political manoeuvring around one of William Macpherson's key recommendations: to increase the proportion of BME police officers. An important basis for increasing the proportion of BME groups in the police is due to pressure on public policy bodies to be more inclusive and representative. This is wider than race and includes gender representation and, commonly, it is based on the proportion in a local population or nationally. The acceptance, denial, and termination of this 10-year policy target underscores the extent of ‘game playing’ with numbers/targets, but it also signals the ways in which the dynamics of race and racism are like a bubble that, when suppressed in one place, ‘pops up’ in another.

The end(s) of institutional racism1

This chapter looks at an employment tribunal case by a senior Asian police officer whose complaint of racial discrimination did not draw on, or refer to, institutional racism at all. It also studies the Race and Faith inquiry, where institutional racism could also have been expected to feature as a key issue but did so in a low-key and awkward way. In exploring these cases, the chapter stresses the significance of contextual factors — meaning the political environment in which they occurred. The relationship between knowledge production and policies requires acts of translation. Thus, it is not enough to say that knowledge and politics interact; it is the form in which they do — and do not — combine in each context that matters.

The impacts of social science1

This chapter examines the Macpherson inquiry to analyse links between academic work and the politics of race and policing. It explores some of the significant academic evidence on institutional racism and on racial attacks presented to the Macpherson inquiry. While it is possible, particularly with institutional racism, to chart a connection between some of that and the conclusions of the inquiry, there is also a significant disconnection that provides a more nuanced idea of what impact is and how it occurs, as shown via the discussion of the internal politics of the Macpherson inquiry. An additional factor is that ‘real time’ events the police respond to indicates that they had, in some ways, already ‘moved on’ from institutional racism as early as 1999, even though that mostly precedes a decade of concerted policy implementation around racism.

Race critical scholarship and public engagement1

This chapter assesses a range of orientations to public engagement and critical race scholarship. There is no one correct way to be an engaged scholar, and each form contains some merit as well as various problems. The purpose of the discussion is not to build models or frameworks; rather, it aims to do several other things: first, to make the case for critical and engaged scholarship on race that is sensitive to the times and places it occurs in, as well as being aware of recurring debates about the relation of the academy to publics. Second, the chapter argues that the academy itself needs to be situated; it cannot be treated as just a neutral or even a liberal place from which the practice of radical or critical scholarship occurs. Finally, it introduces the topic of public sociology.